Twitter’s culture shift post–Elon Musk takeover is drastic: A ‘ghost town’ Slack, terrible coffee, and the work beds are fully booked on weeknights

It’s no secret Twitter has changed dramatically since Elon Musk bought the social media platform last October for $44 billion. Musk’s first move when he took over was to fire the company’s top executives. He later axed around half of the company’s employees, and many more left on their own. 

Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who was fired within days of Musk’s takeover, said the company’s mission to make people’s lives better had “gone to garbage” since the Tesla founder took over.

Now, Twitter’s work culture seems to be focused on long hours, bad coffee, and eerily silent internal communications, according to a new report from Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton at Platformer. 

After famously moving beds into the building so that employees could work longer hours by sleeping at the office, the beds now have to be booked in advance on weeknights, another employee told Platformer. 

And food is no longer free. One employee said that even the coffee seemed like it came from the “absolute worst vendors.”

Another major shift is manifest in Twitter’s Slack. The app, which was once a cornerstone of the social media giant’s culture and a frequently used mode of communication within the company, is now like a “ghost town,” an employee told Platformer.

“People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “Before the transition, it was not uncommon in the team channel to talk about what everybody did that weekend. There’s none of that anymore.” 

In the early days of the takeover, some Twitter employees who were critical of Musk on an internal Slack channel were fired from the company. There were many other casualties among those who took to Twitter to air their dissatisfaction. The “Chief Twit” even went so far as to fire some employees via tweet while having a heated online exchange last November.

Musk has been on a mission to cut down on company expenses since he bought the company by taking on massive amounts of debt. Twitter has already neglected to pay months of rent for its office buildings, forcing the landlords to sue Musk earlier this year. Some of the company’s former employees are also taking legal action against Musk and Twitter for what ex-staffers say is the company’s decision to back out of contractual obligations and not pay them the severance they were promised. Musk has also auctioned off office furniture as well as coffee machines and the company’s signature bird sign statue. 

On Wednesday, Twitter experienced a major outage during which many users were having difficulty using the social media platform. Because of so many staff departures, there were no engineers left in the team handling such issues to fix the problem.